Music under Capricorn

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 940, 16 August 1957, Page 4

Music under Capricorn

Fhursday evening, August 22, listeners will hear from YC stations the first New Zealand performance of three contemporary Australian compositions, An Outback Overture, by John Antill, Alfred Hill’s Symphony Australia, and the Symphonic Suite, Xanadu by Robert Hughes. While in Australia last year for a conference of the Australasian Performing Right Association, the New Zealand composers Douglas Lilburn and Ashley Heenan met Alfred Hill, and heard his Symphony Australia, which the composer completed in 1951. "We both considered it an amazing work, and were both very impressed," Mr Heenan told The Listener. "With age (he is now 86) Alfred Hill’s writing seems to be maturing and improving, and this work has remarkable vitality. There are four movements; the first with an introduction representing ‘the lonely, silent land,’ then an allegro in which the themes stand for ‘the workers’ and

‘the thinkers.’ The second movement is titled ‘Australia the mysterious and beautiful,’ the third ‘the Aborigines,’ and the last ‘the challenge.’ " Alfred Hill had a very good sense of orchestra, said Mr Heenan, and the second and third movements of this symphony showed this faculty off to particular advantage. These movements were often performed separately in Australia, Hill prefaces his score to this symphony with a quotation from the poet George Essex Evans: Her song is silence: unto her Its mystery clings. Silence is the interpreter deeper things. O for sonorous voice and strong To change that silence into song! Which sleeps in the deep heart of peace With folded wings. And the composer adds his own note to the work: "The heart of Australia is lonely and silent. On the fringe of the great Island Continent, men crowd

like ants into the cities they have made. Some seek the quieter places. Australia with its vast plains, forest ranges, rocky coast, and subterranean caves is an eerie place, but very beautify]. In the deep recesses of the Australia they once owned, a few aboriginal tribes still go walkabout. They hunt their food, sing their songs, and dance their tribal rituals. There is a challenge to Australians to build a world worthy of their race and country." John Antill, composer of An Outback Overture, to be heard in this programme, is already well known to New Zealanders for his ballet suite Corroboree which, incidentally, will be played at a National Orchestra Youth Concert later this year. This new work of Antill’s, however, is on a different facet of the Aus-

tralian scene, being based on a memory of one particular .evening camping in the outback. Thé composer notes the following themes as the subject of the overture: The peace and quiet of the

Australian bush, @ running creek, a woolshed-‘"from which comes the sound of an antiquated out-of-repair concertina playing over and over again a ceftain easy phrase." Then there is preparation and the arrival. of guests, a Woolshed Polka and a Midnight Quadrille, accompanied by much clapping of hands and stamping of feet. The overture concludes with the -concertina theme which, the composer notes, "remains in our memories uuti] this day." The third work to be heard, Robert Hughes’s. Xanadu, was composed in 1954. For this work, the composer shared the prize awarded in the orchestral section of the Australasian Performing Right Association’s 1954 competition. The composer notes that the music of Xanadu does not follow any preconceived choreographic scenario, but that while writing the work he had in mind a ballet interpretation. As the music possesses the character of "oriental" music the name of Kubla Khan's fabulous city was chosen. The work is in three "scenes," and the.composer makes free use of a large number of percussion instruments in the orchestration, inclucing gongs, a Chinese cymbal, and tom-toms. The recorded presentation of these works (YCs, August 22, 9.5 p.m.) will be by the National Orchestra conducted by James Robertson.